If you can keep your head when all about you...

Log in

SmokingPipes.com Updates

Watch for Updates Twice a Week

PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor

PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor

PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor

Drucquers Banner

PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor

PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor

Status
Not open for further replies.

phil67

Lifer
Dec 14, 2013
2,052
7
An apropos start to one of Rudyard Kipling’s poems ‘If’ as it pertains to this story out of Britain.
13 Aug 2015:
British people are often stereotyped as having a stiff upper lip, able to weather tempests without breaking a sweat. If life hands you lemons, make lemonade — that sort of thing.

So I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised when the news from London in yesterday’s Telegraph reported:
Elderly man smokes pipe as his car sinks in a lake: Man appeared unconcerned as he awaited rescue from the water
The man in his eighties had gone to fish, but ended up driving his Ford Focus right into the water. Emergency services were called as the other fisherman on the lake watched the car begin to sink, ever so slowly.

Side note: if the marketing department of the Ford Motor Company has an ounce of creativity, they’ll be all over this news story. “Our cars sink slow” could be the next advertising campaign.

But the fact that a car went into a lake (or pond? hard to tell for sure, and you know how Brits use words in strange ways) is not newsworthy—at least not worth hearing about across the Atlantic Ocean (otherwise known as “across the pond”). What makes this story special is the man’s calm response:

West Midlands Ambulance Service said: “After his car ended up in the water, he smoked his pipe and chatted to the farmer who went into the lake in his waders. …”The fishermen said they heard an almighty splash but he was just sitting there and carried on smoking his pipe while the car sank. It went up to the car windows in the end but he just kept puffing away - completely unperturbed by what had happened.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “Do not be anxious about anything” (Philippians 4:6).
Or, in the modern paraphrase of this man from Warwickshire: “Keep Calm and Smoke a Pipe.”
Source: The Washington Times
I’ve always found pipe smoking to be relaxing and I have no idea what he was smoking as it was never mentioned, but damn... I want whatever it is! Either that, or he was just determined to smoke the bowl down to that elusive ‘fine what ash’ with only one light no matter what!

 

zack24

Lifer
May 11, 2013
1,726
2
In the true British tradition, he would have continued to smoke his pipe and stuck his fishing pole out the window to catch the makings for some fish and chips as he awaited his ultimate rescue....

 

jpmcwjr

Moderator
Staff member
May 12, 2015
24,565
27,068
Carmel Valley, CA
Thanks for that Kipling reference- last stanza:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
My son is here, and I will share this with him, as it was shared with me eons ago. I simply need now to follow its maxims!
{There's another thread on the smoking-Brit-in-car-in-pond story about somewhere}

 
Status
Not open for further replies.